Totally confused by titles being too long!
-
We use a wordpress site and have tried some SEO plug-ins in the past. In the analysis, I am getting more than 2,000 pages have titles that are too long and from the results it looks like it was a result of one of these past SEO plug-ins.
Do I need to go through and change all those titles? How bad is it that so many of the old blog posts are too long? Some are too long only in the archive link...
So confused and hating the idea of reworking thousands of posts! Thanks y'all!
-
I have a similar problem but just a mere 500 extra long links. I have whittled 1,148 broken links down to 22 and aiming for zero.
With the titles too long do I need to worry where I have linked out to other sites in a post that that might create new broken links or are there other things I should consider?
I always understood that I could fill that title bar and there would not be a problem. On examining the offending links I see that as the domain name has 32 characters from the first www to the m in .com which when prefaced with http:// and the title in the tilte bar creats a huge url. (I know the domain length is pushing it and know about the number of characters for Adwords)
So I just change the title in Yoast and don't bother about the title at the top of the page and the prermalink that was originally created?
I will do whatever it takes to clear up the problems but would like to sort the title links in one hit as I go through page by page.
Your advice would be appreciated.
-
I want to say Dana is right Yoast will wright the title in a search engine friendly manner
Thomas
-
Dana, it definitely helps! The bigger problem is that with the plug-ins, I can't exactly tell what is too long. Is it the link for the page or what Wordpress considers the title line?
-
Chances are your Titles were being automatically constructed using the Titles of your posts. Yes, you will probably have to go back through and do proper titles for each one so that they don't exceed character lengths in Google and other search engines, but, take heart, it will be worth it. Right now the search engines are either making up their own titles or using truncated versions of your longer titles.
Take the time, go through and write really great titles for those 2,000 posts. It'll benefit you SEO. Don't worry, 2,000 titles really isn't and insurmountable task. You don't need to rework every page, just add titles of the proper length using a plug-in like Yoast. If you do ten a day you can have it done in a month.
Hope that helps a little!
Dana
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
How to add titles to Pardot landing pages
I have 5 URLs that are "missing titles" however, all 5 are landing pages that were created in Pardot. how would I go about adding the missing title? Would I need to add it on our website platform or in Pardot?
Technical SEO | | cbriggs0 -
Duplicate Titles Aren't Actually Duplicate
I am seeing duplicate title errors, but when I go to fix the problem, the titles are not actually identical. Any advice? Becky
Technical SEO | | Becky_Converge0 -
Are duplicate page titles fixed by the canonical tag
Google Web Master Tools is saying that some of my pages have duplicate page titles because of pagination. However, I have implemented the canonical tag on the paginated pages which I thought would keep my site from being penalized for duplicate page titles. Is this correct? Or does canonical tag only relate to duplicate content issues?
Technical SEO | | Santaur0 -
A good META title for a front page....
Hi, We recently asked for some pointers to use on our site bit.ly/4Cogch as one of our SEOmoz private questions. One of the points that was picked up was that the title of the homepage looked quite spammy: Ink Cartridges | Toner Cartridges | Cheap Cartridges | Inkjet Ink | Laser Toner I completely see this however I've checked out our competition and no one seems to be doing things any better and the SEOmoz On Page SEO tool seems to like it so I'm not sure what changes to make. Does anybody have any inspiration that I could possibly use? It was suggested that Google is quite brand focused and so I should integrate the company name but how else would you change things, bearing in mind the ink and toner market that we're focusing on? Thanks for your help! Chris
Technical SEO | | ChrisHolgate0 -
What's the latest on Title Tags?
What is the latest on what Google is looking for? Keyword one, Keyword two? Sentences with the Keyword in them?
Technical SEO | | netviper0 -
Changing all titles
A new client of mine has a terrible Wordpress site with many issues and one of these is keyword stuffing, especially in the title. We all know how bad it is, but then what's the best way to remove the keywords in excess? They stuffed 4 keywords (average 3 terms per keyword) in the wordpress General Settings "Site Title", so all of them are included in the title, and there are 200 pages basically with the same, stuffed, title. I am pretty sure if I remove them, and put a unique keyword per page I would have a huge rank drop, but is there any way to minimize it? 2nd question: should I improove the on-page factors and wait for the rank drop/resume before starting a linkbuilding campaign? Thank you. DoMiSol
Technical SEO | | DoMiSoL0 -
Schema.org how long does it take?
Since 5 days ago I changed my html template in my ecommerce to comply with schema.org for products. How long does it take to be seen on google, our keyword 4700DN, its one that appears in the top 10 results, but it still doesnt show it with schema.org (price+starts+ratings) What should I do? http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets?view=cse&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.theprinterdepo.com%2Fhp-color-laser-4700dn-printer-q7493a
Technical SEO | | levalencia10 -
Help changing category and page titles on established Magento site.
Hi All, This is my first post, I've been a Pro member for a while now, read many posts but have never asked a question here. I have an established Magento site that I need to do a lot of SEO work on. I am a newbie at SEO, so I wanted to ask for advice here. I just changed one of the category names, the url, meta title, and meta description. When making the change I selected the checkbox in the Magento backend that says "Create Permanent Redirect for Old URL" Example:
Technical SEO | | TrulyLuna
Old Category: http://www.domain.com/old-category-name.html
New Category: http://www.domain.com/new-category-name.html Everything worked fine with the exception of one alarming thing... I lost all of the page authority for the category itself and all of the sub categories and pages below it. Now the category and all pages below it show (on the moz toolbar) a PA of 1 and 0 links and 0 domains. I updated the sitemap. I did not do a 301 redirect in the .htaccess, I only chose the option to redirect on the Magento backend when changing the name and url of the category. I need to change a lot of other category and page names and urls but now I'm a bit gun shy, as I do not want to do something that will damage what little page rank I have at the moment. I'm looking for some advice from one of you guys who might be able to help me do this the correct way. I did some research on Google, but I'm still not sure of the correct method to accomplish this. Thanks in advance for any help that you can offer.0